Notes:
The epilogue. The end. This is the end of Ben and Ryan’s story,
short and sweet and sadly not explicit, but I thought it fit. 115 thousand
words, almost a year of writing these guys, agonizing over them and loving them. It’s hard to stop, but I have to move
on. Thank you so, so much to everyone
who’s read this story, and especially the people who commented. You prompted me to take this in a completely
different direction around a third of the way through, and it became a much
stronger story because of it. You all
make writing fun for me, something to look forward to, something to help keep
my crazy life on schedule, and I love it.
I hope you stick with me for the next big thing, but either way, I am so
appreciative of my darlins.
I’m planning on getting this nicely
edited and self-pubbed at some point, and I’ll get all the posts put onto a
single page on the blog when I can, hopefully soon. It’s a slow and painful process—thanks,
Blogger. I wish I had artwork for you
guys as well—one of my goals for the next year is to learn how to make images
to accompany my stories.
Well.
Here we go.
Title:
Love Letters
Part
Forty-One: Epilogue
***
The doorbell rang. Or at least Ben assumed that the doorbell had
to have rung, even though he didn’t hear it, because Ryan bolted down the
stairs, past Ben’s office, into the foyer and had the door open before Ben
could do more than look up from his computer.
He heard a brief conversation, the slam of the door closing and then
Ryan joined him in his office, carrying a fairly big box that hit the ground
with a thud at Ben’s feet.
“Holy shit, that’s heavy,” Ryan said,
bending down next to it and grabbing the utility knife out of his back
pocket. He had on ratty, paint-stained
jeans that were almost half holes and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled
up, and his feet were bare and probably freezing. It was the beginning of December, after all,
and the house was pretty bad at holding in heat.
“This has gotta be them,” Ryan
continued, cutting through the layers of tape that held the box closed. “What else would Penguin be sending you? How many copies did Linda say you’d get?”
“Ten,” Ben said, closing his laptop and
turning his attention to the box. If
this was what he thought it was, he was actually kind of excited to get his
hands on one. Ben felt like he’d barely
had a moment of downtime this last year, between editing his last book and
putting together the proposal for the next one, an examination of the different
methods Revolutionary-era spies used to transmit secret messages. They were fascinating, really, everything
from special inks to cyphers to vital information hidden within the text of a
letter that could only be discerned with the proper stencil placed over
them.
All of that, plus helping Ryan and
Jasmine make the move to Denver last February, getting them settled and
realizing after four months that Ryan spent eighty percent of his time at Ben’s
house. It took Jasmine finally
suggesting it, her “am I a kindergarten teacher, seriously” voice in full
effect, to prompt them to finalize moving in together. Despite being more than a little nervous
about having an actual, real, live-in boyfriend for the first time in ever,
Ryan and Ben’s lives combined into a fairly harmonious whole. They knocked out the wall between the two
guest rooms upstairs and made them into a studio, turned the extra office into
a spare room, and added extra shelves to the library. Most of the time, it was good. It was better than Ben had imagined it could
be.
“Oh, whoops. Fuck.”
Which wasn’t to say it was
perfect. “You cut the dust jackets,
didn’t you?” Ben asked, leaning forward to look in the open box.
“Just one of them.” Ryan held up a fresh-from-the-printers copy
of My Dearest Friend: The Letters at the Heart
of the American Revolution. There
was a vertical slash right through the word Heart. Ben chuckled.
“We can give that one to Heather,
she’ll appreciate the symbolism of it,” Ben said.
“No, I think she’s finally over Sarah,”
Ryan mused, pulling out a stack of books and setting them on the floor.
“What makes you say that?”
“Let’s just say that I think she and
Jasmine are very happy to be living together now, and that I need to learn to
knock,” Ryan said with a sheepish grin.
“You…wait, they what, really?” This was news to Ben. “Why haven’t they said anything?”
Ryan shrugged. “I assume because they’re taking it
slow. Wow, I love the cover.” He grabbed one of the whole copies and stood
up, then stepped around the box and sat down in Ben’s lap. Ben pulled Ryan in close and looked around
his arm at the book. It was a nice
cover, he had to admit. Whereas the last
book’s cover had basically been “Washington Crossing The Delaware” in
miniature, this one showed a writing desk with a copy of Abigail Adams’ most
famous letter to her husband John on top of it, which he’d borrowed from for
the title.
“Your pre-orders were better than ever,
Linda’s got you booked with Terry Gross in January, and my mom will have
bragging rights at her bridge club for the next six months, so everybody’s happy,”
Ryan continued, opening the book to look at the dedication page. His fingertip brushed the curling font,
lingering over his own name. “I can’t
believe I’m in your book.”
When Ben was alone and had time to
indulge in pensiveness, he had moments of not being able to believe it
either. Ben was a lot of things, but a
romantic had never been one of them.
Big, crazy love stories were for other people, usually people he ended
up pitying if he cared at all, because they so often ended so badly. He’d been swept up by Ryan, entranced,
overwhelmed. He’d fled for the sake of
his sanity and then been drawn back for the same reason.
Now they’d settled into a state of
comfort with each other, warm and loving and only occasionally manic or strange—there
was no way to escape it completely, not with their families. Ben couldn’t imagine his life without Ryan
now. He barely remembered what it had been like before: mostly him, alone,
eating takeout and sitting at his computer and barely remembering how to
interact with humanity when the rare friend came around.
He put his hand over Ryan’s and traced
out the lines of the dedication.
This book would never have come about
without inspiration in the form of Ryan, the genesis of my very own love story.
“I don’t think I could have written
about love before I met you,” Ben said, brushing his lips over the nape of Ryan’s
neck and just breathing, inhaling the warmth and the scent of paint and
charcoal and the man underneath it. “It
wouldn’t even have occurred to me, and I could never have meant it.”
Brody had been the inspiration for the
first book—he’d given up a chance to be a professional football player to join
the army and serve his country, and Ben had wanted to understand that kind of
patriotism and what could inspire it. Brody
was honor and faith, but Ryan was love.
Ben was lucky to have both of them, even if only in memory in Brody’s
case.
“Hmm.”
Ryan turned his head and caught Ben’s mouth in a soft kiss. “You know, Linda told me that if you make the
New York Times list this week, she’ll send me a bouquet of roses for acting as
your muse. She said if the next one
makes the list too, she’ll exchange the roses for a trip to Hawaii.”
“She’ll stop at nothing, will she?” Ben
sighed, but he was too content to be bothered. “That’s nice of her, I guess.”
“She might have mentioned something
about making you do some book signings while we were out there,” Ryan added
with a grin. “Still, though. Every bit of motivation helps, right?”
“And is that what you need for your
book?” Ben asked, pulling Ryan a little tighter against him. His body was already interested, even though
they’d just been sitting there. “Motivation?”
“Absolutely. Janie and the Phantom are about to confront
Circe, and I have no idea how they’re going to escape her seductive clutches,”
Ryan laughed.
“You want practice escaping?” Ben ran one hand beneath the hem of Ryan’s
shirt and stroked warm skin, slowly making his way up.
“Nnn-no,” Ryan said, wiggling a little
but in no way trying to get away. “I was
thinking…thinking maybe we could just practice the seduction part.”
“I think we are.” Ben rolled his hips slowly up into Ryan,
captivated by the sound of his lover’s moan.
“Do you feel seduced yet?
Thoroughly trapped?”
“I don’t think I’ll be able to escape.” Ryan turned and twisted to kiss
Ben again. “I don’t think I’ll ever want
to.”
“Yeah,” Ben said softly. “Me neither.”
